Words in the cracks
[Applause]
hi everyone i must just tell you this
story before i start my talk i’m i’m the
fish out of water on time and this whole
thing i’m not nhs
um and i didn’t really know how much of
a fish out of water i was until a
conversation i had just today this isn’t
on the script
um but um yesterday we some of us
met for a rehearsal and so yesterday i
was in jeans and shirts would be
informal so the first time anyone in the
production team or anyone my fellow
speakers are seen in uniform was today
walking in this building
and uh loads of really strange comments
but this is my favorite
um paul just seeing you in your uniform
walking around an nhs event
in a theater you look a little bit like
a stripper
okay um i’m here
uh i’m gonna start with this picture
it’s um obviously a picture of our
beautiful country
taken from the international space
station and um
you know we live on this amazing planet
don’t we planet earth and
um you know science is just a testing of
hypothesis so we don’t really know
quite how old earth is but the current
theory is that it’s about 4.5
billion years old which is quite old um
we as
a specimen of species of of the earth
are not quite so old um
and again depending on what scientific
approaches you uh you believe
and the oldest we can be really is
something like seven million years old
um but maybe if we you know you consider
us like a mobile phone
um our latest upgrade into homo sapiens
is around sort of one to two hundred
thousand years old
so we haven’t been here very long
compared to the beautiful bit of rock
that we live in
um if actually if you put the history of
the earth into context and put it into a
24-hour clock
we haven’t been here long at all so we
arrived
in our former current form homo sapiens
in latin means wise man whatever
however you want to interpret that but
we arrived at 23
57 hours we’ve only been here
for the last three minutes of the
earth’s life
it’s not a long time is it so what have
we achieved in our three minutes of fame
well i guess if you really start to
think about what we’ve done
you’re automatically going to start to
think about things like history
behaviors
public stuff that we all know and read
about in the in the press or in history
books
so i guess on the most amazing
examples of what we’ve done penicillin
the internet
splitting the atom uh man on the moon
that kind of stuff but at our worst
may be our worst our worst hour was the
holocaust
um and even today you know our greed is
so out of control that
2.3 billion people one in three people
amongst us on the on the earth will wake
up this morning without a toilet
so at best we are incredible species at
worst
potentially we don’t even deserve to
breathe with that awful
so it’s such a range of of who we are
that gets your whole in whole thinking
into identity as a mental health
sergeant working in the nhs and have
been for the last four to five years
my passion is actually evolution of not
what we’ve done behaviorally but
actually what’s driving it
inside because everything we
fundamentally do in our behaviors and
our choices is fundamentally triggered
by something
inside and obviously mental health is a
massive part of that
let me just give you three examples of
how i think we might have evolved so
three moments in our time just random
out off top of my head
off top of my head but they’re selected
by me so
adam and eve whether you believe this is
a true story a literal story or an
allegory you know representative
representation of the human race
potentially adam and eve arguably was
the first man and woman to actually
choose an identity they went against
what their
their purpose was their their god-given
identity was and they said no no no we
can we can be who we want to be
so that was the first maybe the first
arguably moment in time that
that we chose our own identity
uh another moment in time 1957 the dawn
of television
the first television advert was for a
toothpaste called gibbs sr
some of you will remember it i won’t
because i wasn’t alive
um but was that a moment where we went
okay so we can be what we want to be and
now actually we can have what we want to
have
and this is this is all connected with
our identity so marketing advertising
media
magazines size 10 size 8 size 6 all the
pressures
that are now building up on humanity
with our own internal evolutionary
identity
maybe 20 years later in the 1980s in
this country probably was a defining
decade for us i was alive then
um but maybe that year maybe that decade
thatcherism
materialism markets foot market forces
capitalism
was the decade where we accelerated
again and actually it was like well we
can be who we want to be we can have
what we want to have
and now actually we can have everything
we want loads of money
so you can see how we’ve evolved in the
last three minutes internally and how
that affects our
behaviour on the outside
so i just want to talk to you about
um what that evolution has had that
evolutionary effect has had on my own
life
because if we take it to the extremes if
we have to be everything we want it to
be and other people’s expect us to be
if we have to look like the right person
sound like the right person drive the
right car
we become diseased with things called
perfectionism
or an approval addiction and i’m not
going to the long short story of it but
i
suffer from approval addiction it comes
out of my childhood most of our damage
and brokenness comes out of our
childhood but i suffer from
approval addiction and a bit of
perfectionism at best
it uh makes me really productive it
makes me really successful it makes me
achieve a lot
it’s probably the reason why i’m
standing here today at worst
it cripples me at worst it makes me
depressed i still take antidepressants
today and i probably will for the rest
of my life
so it’s a real balance it’s a real fight
um
this whole perfectionism thing i want to
give you
three moments in my life when i’ve
actually changed the language of my life
i want to use this thing called
kenzugi kinsugi is a japanese art form
and it is totally
counter-cultural to the whole
perfectionism
that we live amongst today in this
country
konsugi is about piecing broken stuff
back together
in this country broken stuff is
discardable wastable
it’s not wantable it’s all those you
know all those different things we just
go oh it’s broken let’s
get another one consuki completely
challenges
that whole concept of brokenness is bad
because it pieces the stuff back
together it sees broken stuff as a
point in time of that item’s life
it says it shows that the chip or the
scar or the mark
is just a part of this object’s history
it values the object whatever
form it’s in and it pieces it back
together but not just with
average glue no no no it pieces it
pieces it back together with the most
precious commodities that we
value gold and silver and platinum
so by the end of the whole consogi
process the item is still valued but now
it’s valued more and it’s even more
unique than it was in its original form
the cracks in the kansugi potentially
are
also opportunities for us to grow as
individuals because we can actually
write different words in those cracks
when we break
so i put it to you that actually
breaking as human beings is actually a
good thing
i’m going to tell you about three words
that i’ve written into the cracks in my
life
and i’m going to tell you how i came
acro across those
those words and only how i came across
those words
so i define myself by three words in the
concept of consuming the first word
i define myself as resilient these all
happened in 2010
i knew that i was resilient i chose and
wrote the word resilient in the crack in
my
consuge person in june 2010 when i stood
on the edge of a 200-foot cliff on the
eastern edge of the isle of wight where
i live with a coast guard helicopter
over my head
and my colleagues coming down the hill
to section me
i could have jumped and actually
unbeknown to them
every time they detained me under
section 136
actually i’ve been here many more times
i went to the cliff to build resilience
i went to the cliff to go
no i don’t want to do this because for
the days leading up to that moment i had
been suffering and suffering and
thinking that the hope was was going so
i went to the cliff to go no
you’re better than that you’re resilient
and i would then start another two one
or two or three weeks of hope
until it drained again and i would go
back to the cliff and go
no you’re resilient that was my
relationship with the 200-foot cliff so
i wrote the word resilient in the cracks
in my consuki body
the second word i wrote for myself only
came through another episode of being
cracked i spent 14 hours
in a police cell not just any police
cell
my own police cell the cell i used to
run as a custody sergeant i spent 14
hours in detention
under arrest for criminal offence
relating to my serious
severe depression and that experience
and three hours an interview that i
experienced was
one of the most life-changing
career-changing moments of my career
because i suddenly realized just how bad
not just my
my force was this is this was a national
problem but how
illiterate the police service was when
it comes to mental health if you fast
forward the criminal justice process
from us we’re the investigation
branch of the criminal justice system if
you fast forward into prisons 80
of people in prison have got one mental
illness
60 of people in prison have got two
mental illnesses and people like me put
them there
through courts that have no literal
literacy with mental health either
it wasn’t until i experienced the
illiteracy and unprofessionalism
unfortunately to say
over police service dealing with someone
who was fundamentally broken not bad did
i realize how
awful things were and how things needed
to change i could have walked away from
my organization at that point and go do
you know what no more
but i chose to write a new word in my in
my crack and that was rebel
which is quite ironic for a conformist
law enforcer what do i mean by rebel do
i
you know do i go into police stations
and start pushing people around no of
course i don’t
what i’m what i’m talking about is
actually when you see a culture that’s
failing when you see a process or a
procedure that’s failing you
deliberately push against it because no
one else is going to
you become a non-conformist for a really
good reason you become a rebel
through something that’s that’s grown
inside you so i’m now a resilient
rebel and those are the new words in my
cracks two words i would have never have
written for myself had i not been
that broken the third word i wrote is
innovator i’m on the national innovation
accelerator program
um we’ve we’ve got a new model of care
and we’re scaling up across the
country but i wasn’t going to be an
innovator in my life until i spent three
weeks on the mental health ward
and when i spent three weeks on a mental
health award eating and playing
chess and board games and spending time
with people in the garden that had
similar mental illnesses to me
actually i looked around and saw many
many people in the mental health or that
where i
where i was many of them definitely
needed to be there they had
mental illnesses that they definitely
needed you know proper care proper
medication
they were in the right place but many
many more
were there because they weren’t actually
mentally ill the mental illness was just
the surface symptoms of what actually
wasn’t a mental illness
it was an identity illness it made me
realize that the nhs system in the
mental health
world is actually in many areas
massively over medicalized
because actually the fundamental root
causes of why people like me end up in
mental health
situations is because we have lost or
forgotten or have never known
our true identity so i became an
innovator out of that
we we’ve redeveloped stuff we started
street triage and we start we’ve now got
an integrated mentoring program
that looks after the most chaotic and
most challenging and the most risky
patients that go around the 999 system
i am a resilient risky uh risky
resilient
rebellious and slightly risky um
innovator
these are three words that i’ve written
into my own cracks they’re not yours
they’re mine
they’re mine i hold on to them dearly so
i’m going to finish
with some reflections and to give this
back to you
if you are the vars are you broken
if some of you are thinking now i’m not
broken you’re either a liar or a
narcissist
or both
so what in the privacy of your own
thoughts if you are that
that that pot that vars and those are
your cracks
what words are currently in those cracks
are you dealing with those cracks
how wide are they how deep do they go
how close are you to breaking what words
are currently defining
how unperfect you are
but the most important thing is actually
if you’re going to break
break what words are you going to write
in there in their place like i did
what new words can you write not just
coping words what words can you write
that just are the most profoundly
opportunistic doorway
loving passionate creative
new words that you never thought you’d
ever be able to describe yourself with
those are the words that truly matter
ernest hemingway said this i’m just
paraphrasing massively but he said the
world is going to break
all all every one of you in this room it
will break you
but you only get stronger in the broken
places
so don’t be a perfectionist go for break
the nhs apparently is broken yes it’s
broken
why do i say that who wants to work in a
perfect forming nhs it’s just boring
right
a broken nhs organization is a perfect
landscape it’s a perfect
blank canvas for innovators and ideas
and new words to
be put onto the page you guys are the
gold and silver and the platinum i’ve
worked with you for four years
by default because you care because you
look after other people before
yourselves
for me you’re the top 1 of the british
population
you are incredible i love working with
you all
so go back into your organizations and
fix stuff with new words
final message from me whenever and
however you break
break well
but the most important thing and you
will be in my prayers tonight
is find the most amazing words for
yourself and you’ll live the most
amazing life
thank you for listening